How 'Una Carne Asada' Can Change the Way You Cook

A year and a half ago, my friend Sasha started dating this fellow Luis Alvarez y Alvarez. Bushy salt-and-pepper Castro beard, slicked-back hair, barrel-chested like Hemingway, born and raised in Mexico City, and a film editor by trade. He quickly became the most worldly, fun-loving guy in our circle of friends.

He also knows how to cook.

Luis and I often talked about getting together to grill the kind of food he grew up eating. I wanted him to help me embrace the spirit of the July 2014 issue’s theme (“Global Grilling”) and break out of my grilling routine—steak, ribs, steak, ribs, burgers.

I sent what I thought was a simple enough e-mail: “What might we grill?”

Four hundred and six words later, I had my answer. “Una carne asada,” Luis replied. “That’s how we call the event of grilling. And it implies there’s going to be a party; it doesn’t just refer to grilled meat.”

There would be freshly made tortillas, he went on, both corn and flour. Pinto beans, simmered in a clay pot, some of which he would fry to “schmear” on one’s tortilla. (Luis had picked up some New Yorkese since moving to the U.S. 20 years ago.)

There would be steak pounded thin like scaloppine, and thicker cuts that we would chop. Guacamole—“But for tacos, I prefer to scoop out thin avocado slices with a spoon,” he wrote. “I’d also have watercress with thin red onion slices to use as garnish.”

On the night my wife, Simone, and I arrived at Sasha and Luis’s garden-level apartment in Brooklyn, all of those dishes (and then some) were neatly arranged on the kitchen table. Soon, tortillas were pressed and griddled. Beers were poured, and steak was charred over a charcoal grill.

It was all far better than I could have imagined—a literal feast. One that I’ll probably never replicate in its entirety, but I do know I’ll cherry-pick elements from it, starting with those two simple but startling salsas.

They’re the kind of recipes that remind you that changing the way you cook isn’t difficult—you just have to want to do it.